Livn' La Vida Three Year Old

I am caffeine powered. My three year old daughter is nuclear powered. She derives fuel directly from the sun as it creates stellar energy.

She no longer needs to nap. Or really, eat. She lives on Polly Pockets and day-long playdates at the park.

Oh, and this kind of weird, artificial laugh she's developed. You ask her if she wants more fruit and she throws her mouth wide open and laughs like a forty-year old, "HAHAHAHA".

Then of course, she seems to gain great strength from her philosophical outlook on life.

Her early phase of inquiry was purely empirical~fingers jammed in to a bowl of frozen blueberries yielded-cold.

But that's when she was two. She's three now and her powers for reasoning have increased in direct proportion to her love for mini Peppermint Patty's.

Yesterday she was in rare form. Made the Energizer Bunny look like a narcoleptic.

Ella played all day, then skipped her nap, proudly walking out of the bedroom at 3:00pm declaring, "I'm just not tired Dana...".

My wife, though clearly a saint among mere mortals hasn't slept well the last few nights. In that condition, you miss one afternoon toddler nap and you're ready to eat a bullet for dinner. As Ann walked out of the bedroom after Ella it was clear from the look on her face she needed either:

a. Drugs
b. A hot affair
c. Some help

Needless to say, we can't very well be telling our little Angel "Just say no" while popping Vicodan like M&M's, and thankfully Ann is way too tired to have an affair. Even a lukewarm one.

So we picked "C". I scooped up Mighty Might and off to the park we went. We ran. We swung. We see-sawed. We chased each other. We played Cinderella. We went to our friend Rosie's, where Ella and Rosie tore her place apart, laughed out loud, tried to remove tufts of hair from one another and gobbled down mini-cheeseburgers.

By 8:00pm Ella was yawing. My plan was working. By 8:15pm we were in the tub, en route to an early bed-time. So there we are, tub full of dollies, us wet and soapy.

Ella was giving her tiny doll a good scrub down when she asked: "What are we doing tonight?".

Just like that. Like, "Nice little break. What's on the books for the evening~build our own particle accelerator?".

I just burst out laughing it was so funny. I said "You crack me up!".

Prompting her to ask "Why am I cracking you up?".

Dana: Oh, because you have such fun.
Ella: Why I have fun?
Dana: Well, I don't know~you just enjoy living so much.
Ella: When are we dying?
Dana: *pause*
Dana: *pause*
D: Well...not right now. And when we do, we'll relate to it then.
E: Okay.

So yeah. Basically what passes for casual tub-time conversation for my daughter is a brief inquiry of one's mortality.

I wonder sometimes what its like for her, raising a fortysomething dad.

Probably though, I won't ask her...